The Trinity Bill, which can't be explained in simple terms and has been causing ructions in academic circles for years, passed all stages in the Dail last week and now awaits presidential signature. It provides for an outsider to sit on the board. One of its greatest critics is Des O'Malley, and last week he had another go in the Dail. Like medical politics, academic politics were sometimes quite vicious, he said, and since his challenge of parts of the bill, he had been subject to some very vituperative comments - publicly and privately. A University of Dublin professor had written a letter of complaint about him to his party leader, and asked her to bring him to heel. "The only construction one can put on the O'Malley move," wrote the unnamed Prof, "is some deeper hostility or jealousy arising from the thinking of the Tierney/McQuaid era and their systematic attempt to downgrade and eventually abolish the college."
Mary Harney appears not to have brought him to heel, because O'Malley went on to say that he then contemplated his relationship with the two gentlemen and found himself considerably at odds with them. "I was almost thrown out of UCD for challenging some decisions Dr Tierney had made, and I had great difficulties with Dr McQuaid on at least two occasions when I was Minister for Justice, the details of which I will not go into."
Because he didn't favour either Tierney or McQuaid, he thought the House might be interested in an Irish Times literary competition when the ban on Trinity was removed in the early 1970s. The then literary editor, Terence de Vere White, picked a winner, but he couldn't award the prize because he would have to publish the entry, and this he was afraid to do. The winning author, masked, gave it to O'Malley, and O'Malley read it into the Dail record as follows:
Said Archbishop McQuaid in a Lenten tirade:
You may rob and may loot
You may murder and shoot
You may even have carnal knowledge;
But if you want to be saved and not be depraved
You must stay out of Trinity College.
Let's hope O'Malley's autobiography will give us more of the same - especially the difficulties with McQuaid.